Shami was asleep in my arms. As usual he had a fever. It wasn’t too high, though his breathing was raspy and labored. I’d stolen some of Binti-Ma’am’s alcohol that morning. An alcohol-soaked rag was wrapped tightly around his chest. Aamaal picked through a rubbish heap across the street from us. I scolded her whenever she accidentally picked up broken glass or syringes, though she rarely did. Aamaal had learned quickly how to avoid the dangers of our world. Most days she amassed a small bag of recyclables, carefully sorted, to sell to the rag picker when his cart rattled by. I let her keep what she earned. We could have used the money but she wouldn’t have stuck with it if she’d had to share. It was worth it just to keep her busy. “Are you sure they can be trusted?” asked Parvati, for perhaps the tenth time. A lot had changed in the months since Parvati’s rape, not the least of which was Parvati herself. She’d always been distrustful of strangers; that was just common sense in a community where most of the girls and women we knew had been forced into sex work.
